A Quick Conversation With “Stone Cold” Steve Austin

Share.

A wrestling legend sits down with IGN and talks about wrestling and... podcasts?

By Richard George

I sit at a small, round table in the corner of a WWE 2K14 event. The walls surrounding me are decorated by graphics from the game, featuring stylized presentations of legendary wrestlers past and present. Hulk Hogan. Shawn Michaels. The Rock. Andre the Giant.

But I’m here to talk to arguably the greatest WWE superstar of all time. The man who almost single-handedly reversed a steep decline in WWE’s business in the late ‘90s. A man who changed fans’ perceptions of wrestling forever.

Any time I meet a wrestler, I don’t really know what to expect. Wrestling is a fascinating blend of reality and fiction, and I often find the superstars themselves, while very much their own person, to showcase some traits of what millions see on TV every week. Fiction? Reality? I don’t know, but when I think of everything Steve Austin and I might talk about, the last thing I expect is him to ask what iPhone app I’m using to record our chat.

“Hey man, what recording gimmick is that? What’s the quality?”

For a split-second I’m surprised. Why would Steve Austin want to talk about this? I’ve talked to Cody Rhodes about great southern barbecue and long-forgotten EA game Dante’s Inferno with Randy Orton. But... a recording app?

It clicks in my head as I quickly recall one of Austin’s key activities these days - The Steve Austin Show, a podcast available on iTunes and elsewhere. At 38 episodes strong, this is clearly a focus for a man that could quite honestly put his fame and talent towards anything. In fact as I type this, Austin is planning to sit down and chat with two-time WWE Hall of Fame recipient Ric Flair for a future episode. And while the series could easily become something that is over-produced or overly complicated, Austin’s involvement ensures it retains a sincere, raw edge. There’s no better evidence of this than the first episode’s title: “WTF I’m Doing Here.”

And that, coincidentally, was my first question to Austin. Why a podcast?

“I wanted to do a podcast about a year ago, but didn’t take the initiative and get going with it. But what I look at it as is a creative outlet, to reach my fanbase. You know, when you’re in the WWE, and you’re in 160 countries around the world, 30 different languages - and then you get off that ride - you might as well be on a street corner with a megaphone yelling s**t out. You know? You’ve lost your broadcast platform. So the Steve Austin Show - even though this is 10, 11 years after I retired - is basically audio whoop ass. It doesn’t even really have a format, it’s just whatever I want to talk about. Conversations. Interviews. Humor. Insight or advice. It’s wrestling, it’s life. It’s a creative outlet for me to exercise my brain - bottom line.”

Austin’s foray into podcasting isn’t just a vehicle for him to connect with his fans, but a legitimate business opportunity for the man who defined an entire era of wrestling. Yet it remains something new, an untapped opportunity that could certainly build to something significant as Austin explores its potential.

But experimental podcasts aren’t why Austin and I are sitting at a table surrounded by the larger-than-life caricatures of wrestling legends. We’re here to talk about the legacy of something that likewise started as an experiment and grew into something that has come to define the entire wrestling industry - Wrestlemania.

Austin’s time at the top of WWE’s active roster spanned Wrestlemania 12 to Wrestlemania 19, and in many respects his most defining, memorable moments came on this grand stage. Austin’s match with Bret Hart at Wrestlemania 13 catapulted him to an elite status few men have achieved in WWE, and at Wrestlemania 14, he captured his first WWE Championship. Wrestlemanias 15, 17 and 19 will likely be forever defined by a trilogy of matches between ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and The Rock, with each match containing a very unique storyline, culminating with Austin’s retirement.

Austin’s Wrestlemania experience started with the twelfth iteration of the show, in a match against Savio Vega in Los Angeles. Austin doesn’t remember the match too well, but he recalls not having much time after the planned runtime of the bout was cut down. “We had a great chemistry together, but I wasn’t really over and he wasn’t really over. It was a match. We were basically warming up the crowd, and it was what it was - a match without a lot of hullabaloo.”

Austin’s philosophy behind the eventual burning desire to main event at Wrestlemania wasn’t driven by nostalgia - in fact it wasn’t his goal as he got started in the industry - he just wanted to be in the industry. But the need to sit at the top of Wrestlemania eventually formed. “In anything you do, you want to be the best,” he told me. “If you’re the best, you’re going to be in the main event, and of course everyone wants to go to Wrestlemania because it’s the biggest show of the year. And the higher you are on the card, well, the better off you are.” It’s a simple and effective logic that drove Austin to outperform and outdraw his peers during the Attitude Era, and his legacy stands as unequivocal, everlasting proof.

During the Attitude Era, WWE underwent a massive transformation, not just in content but in the scope of venues it could support. With show after show selling out, it was only natural that a massive event like Wrestlemania would move from something like the Arrowhead Pond (XII) to Safeco Field (XIX). That change in scenery certainly matters to the audience - in-person or at home - but I wanted to know how much it affected the wrestlers themselves. Did that evolution make any sort of difference in what they did?

It turns out there is an impact, but it’s less about scope and more about sound. “When you go to a place like Toronto, the Sundome, the acoustics aren’t real good in that place. You can be in there - this actually happened to us in Detroit, when I was refereeing the match between Vince’s side and Trump’s side - and you think you’re stinking up the joint because you can’t hear anything. You need those speakers on the ring apron. [In Detroit] we thought we were s***ing the bed out there. That’s more on specific, trickier buildings though. On 20,000 seaters versus 70,000 seaters, a couple hours before when you see the setup, it’s certainly awe-inspiring, but as far the work goes, as long as the acoustics are good, it’s all the same.”

Though I wanted to get to Austin’s picks for best Wrestlemania technical performer (Shawn Michaels) and entertainer (Hulk Hogan), Austin’s discussion about acoustics sidetracked our conversation. These are the sorts of things that move out of the typical best/favorite/toughest discussion that tends to occupy most wrestling conversations, and considering I had attended a recent RAW in Brooklyn, where the crowd reactions were intense and dominant, I asked Austin to discuss how different regions can make or break a show.

“Different areas of the States are going to buy different stuff. And even expanding on that, if you go over to Germany or the UK or anywhere over there, you can just do something like a tackle and the [audience explodes],” Austin said. “But if you can get over somewhere like Madison Square Garden, you can get over anywhere. By the same token, you can go 50 miles away to something like the Nassau Coliseum, which is a very heel-oriented crowd. A babyface would never want to make a comeback in the Coliseum, because they’ll just s**t all over you. But Madison Square Garden is special - it weren’t easy, you had to earn ‘em. New York is a tough city. Anyone, from any walk of life, who has headlined there will tell you that is a special building.”

With that, my time was up. A few brief questions with a legendary performer, a man who has experienced everything wrestling can offer, including some of the greatest moments in his industry’s history. WWE 2K14 will offer a chance to relive some of those iconic matches - but more on that topic... in my WWE 2K14 30 Years of Wrestlemania impressions.